Re: hack: arabic/vnc on linux client

[Munzir Taha <munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa>]

On Monday 08 December 2003 04:57, Moustafa Mounir Elqabbany مصطفى منير القباني 
wrote:
> It's actually still an issue.  What I presented was a hack.  But the xkb
> extension still doesn't work over vnc, whether linux or windows.
>
> Let me rephrase: when using vnc, the characters that appear on the
> remote machine are always taken from the local machine's keymap.

I received this from Constantin, the maintainer of TightVNC:

"Well, current TightVNC does not support the XKB extension, because its
Xvnc is based on outdated XFree86 sources. RealVNC 4.0 (which is
currently beta) should support XKB, and xf4vnc should do it too.

In the future, we plan to switch to the RealVNC 4 as the base for our
project, so I hope XKB support will be available in TightVNC some day. 
Unfortunately, I cannot promise that it will happen very soon, sorry."

> And since it looks like you're looking for issues to work on, :) 

Actually, I am looking for all the issues to be known and recorded. Ahmed! 
Where is the bug page?

> neither 
> xmms nor Realplayer 9 (on FC1) handle Arabic paths properly.  RP9 for
> Linux is a community project.  While xmms can traverse the directories
> but displays them as gibberish, RP can't even open a file if Arabic is
> in the path.

Regarding xmms, a bug two bugs are already filed at
http://bugs.xmms.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1123
http://bugs.xmms.org/show_bug.cgi?id=826
by Mohamed Eldesoky. The problem is xmms developers don't want to switch to 
gtk+2 in the near future for backward compatibility with lots of old plugins.

For RealPlayer try any KDE or gtk2 app that plays real media files. There are 
many.

> (The above message uses Unicode (UTF-8) encoding.)

Since you are writing in English only, UTF-8 doesn't make any difference.

> So what I 
> did was run kxkb on the local machine (RH9) and switch keyboard maps
> using it while accessing the remote machine (FC1).  This is a
> workaround.  The xkb extension needs to be supported on vnc.

It's supported now. Please, go and try realVNC and confirm whether it's Ok.

-- 
Munzir Taha
PGP Key available:
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Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Linux Registered User #279362 at http://counter.li.org
Mandrake Club member
Maintainer of Mandrake Arabization Project Status (MAPS)
http://www.arabeyes.org/download/documents/distro/mdkarabicsupport.html
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS
New Horizons CLC
Riyadh, SA